A protocol analyzer can be used to help engineers and designers solve challenges on serial and parallel buses in electronics and computing products. Protocol analyzers can be configured to analyze multiple network protocols. Protocol analyzers typically include features such as trace buffers and cross-sequence triggering.
Protocol analyzers can be configured to capture and analyze traffic from one or more buses. Corresponding debugging and analysis software can then be configured to analyze and display the traffic to a user. Network traffic containing error events is of particular interest. For example, a protocol analyzer may include very large trace buffers of 16, 64 or 256 million events. The protocol analyzer may then be in communication with a host computer, via a USB connection for example. The host computer can include corresponding debugging and analysis software that can be used to debug and analyze the network traffic stored in the trace buffers. The debugging and analysis software can sometimes use the network traffic stored in the trace buffers to recreate an error in a network device in an effort to determine the cause of the error.
It can sometimes be difficult to recreate an error in a network device using network traffic stored in the trace buffers. For example, transitory conditions in the network device during the original generation of the error may have been altered by the time that an attempt to recreate the error is performed. This alteration in these transitory conditions over time can make recreating the error difficult or impossible.